Royal Mail strike began with small dispute at a delivery office in central London

The national strike, which is threatening to bring the postal network to a
standstill, began with a row over the future of several hundred staff at a
delivery office in central London.

Postal services could grind to a halt due to the strikePhoto: PA

By Christopher Hope, Whitehall Editor

4:10PM BST 08 Oct 2009

The trouble started in May, when local managers started to implement parts of the company’s controversial 2009 cost-cutting business plan, after five months of fruitless talks with representatives from the Communication Workers Union.

The plan was deeply divisive. It had called for a 10 per cent cut in costs at depots and sorting offices across the country – and cuts of 22 per cent in London. It was the latest attempt by Royal Mail to reshape the organisation to cope with a 10 per cent annual fall in the amount of mail being sent.

These modernisation plans had been agreed in principle after the last national postal strike in October 2007. Yet the devil was in the detail.

The plans included cutting overtime, forcing some full-time staff to work part-time and cancelling set delivery times for some business mail.

Yet, Royal Mail sources claimed that the CWU had already sabotaged any attempt to agree the cuts by telling members in April not to engage in talks with Royal Mail on the efficency savings.

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Finally, in May managers in Royal Mail’s East City Delivery Office at the Mount Pleasant sorting office in central London took matters into their own hands and started to implement the cuts among 450 delivery office workers.

One Royal Mail source said: “We did out utmost to try to get the union to engage with us on the changes taking place at a local level. This was in line with the 2007 agreement.”

The result was uproar and prompted an immediate call by CWU representatives for local strike action.

News of the ballot at Mount Pleasant spread and soon workers in Edinburgh, Plymouth and Bristol North were balloting for strike action. It was the spark that was needed and scores of other local offices followed in the succeeding weeks.

Over the summer, workers at hundreds of delivery offices, mail centres and van depots balloted for strike action as the dispute escalated.

By the end of last month, 700 Royal Mail delivery offices and depots had agreed to stage localised strikes, involving 13,000 workers.

The result was chaos in the mail system, with some households waiting for up to two weeks for cheques, bank statements and credit card bills to arrive.

The CWU said some 30million items of mail were stuck in the mail system – although this figure was disputed by Royal Mail.

Talks at a national level between the leaders of the CWU and Royal Mail failed to get any agreement.

Then last month the CWU announced that it was balloting its 121,000 members for the first national strike in two years.

Lord Young, the postal affairs minister, added: “A national postal strike is completely self defeating and will only serve to hurt consumers and businesses who rely on the post and drive even more people away from using mail.”

Meanwhile major customers have started to make their own plans to deliver their post. Internet retailer Amazon signed up a rival courier firm to deliver its goods in the event of a strike.

TNT, the Dutch postal giant, said it expected to win more major mail contracts in Britain, to add to the deals to delivery British Gas and BT phone bills from Royal Mail. The future of Royal Mail has never looked more uncertain.